Antecedents, correlates, and consequences of sexual jealousy

The paper presents a social-psychological approach to the empirical study of sexual jealousy, after surveying the philosophical, sociological, anthropological, psychoanalytic, and nonscientific literature on the subject. The social-psychological approach focuses on the environmental and situational factors that cause people to act in a jealous manner. One hundred and three men and women varying in age, length of relationship, and relationship style responded to a specially designed sexual jealousy inventory. Results indicated that jealousy is a negative physiological, emotional, and mental state, experienced at least at some point of their lives by all the subjects in the study. Numerous antecedents, correlates, and consequences of jealousy were investigated and discussed. Fifty-four percent of the subjects described themselves as “a jealous person” even when they had good situational reasons to feel less secure in the relationship and to experience jealousy, and even though this dispositional self-attribution has negative consequences for coping.